Connectivity:Usability:High Level Design

DTP Usability: High Level Design

(Work in progress -- DRAFT - started 1/22/08)

This document will serve as the starting point for the conversation going forward about DTP Connectivity UI usability concerns and design choices/decisions. The goal is to open the conversation to the community to gain feedback and input all the way along the process, from now to EclipseCon 2008 where we will be able to demonstrate a prototype of many of the concepts and decisions documented and discussed here.

The general plan is to open the discussion up for the next two weeks (through February 6) and then take a cut of the decisions at that point to start coding a prototype. That doesn't mean that feedback should stop, but that if we don't stop soon enough we won't have enough time to code some of these concepts for EclipseCon. After EclipseCon, we'll make decisions regarding distribution (for example whether these changes should be made to the main codeline or provided as an alternative path in a separate feature) and fine tuning for the Ganymede release.

Keep in mind that this process will continue long after Ganymede also, but we wanted to get started down the usability path as soon as we had the resources to do so. We'll see what we can get into Ganymede and then determine what we would like to see in future releases. So please continue to provide feedback even after the Ganymede process is done, as we will continue to work on usability for the forseeable future.

Driver UI

A number of suggestions have come in from folks regarding the "clickyness" of the process of creating a driver and a connection profile. Some folks have mentioned that there are a great many steps required to go from a new workspace to having a connection profile you can connect to, and a good chunk of those steps appear in the Driver UI portions of the process.

That said, I'm proposing a few minor changes to existing framework objects to simplify some of the more common steps.